Microwaving destroys vital nutrients

MURCIA, SPAIN. A team of Spanish researchers reports that microwaving broccoli virtually eliminates its vital antioxidant nutrients. The researchers cooked broccoli in 4 different ways � steaming, pressure cooking, boiling, and microwaving. They found that steaming preserved about 90% of the bioflavonoid antioxidant content, pressure cooking preserved about 45% (the rest being lost in the water), boiling preserved about 35%, and microwaving only about 2%. In other words, 98% of perhaps the most important components of broccoli as far as health protection and cancer prevention are concerned were lost in microwaving. The same group of researchers has also found that broccoli heads lose 50-80% of their vital nutrient content between harvest and actual sale at the retail level.

Meanwhile a team of Finnish researchers has discovered that blanching vegetables prior to freezing them results in a loss of about 30% of their antioxidant content. Freezing in itself also causes a small loss of antioxidants.
Microwave cooking zaps nutrients. New Scientist, October 25, 2003, p. 14
Vallejo, F, et al. Health-promoting compounds in broccoli as influenced by refrigerated transport and retail sale period. J Agric Food Chem, Vol. 51, May 7, 2003, pp. 3029-34

Editor's comment: Raw food contains more nutrients than cooked food, but unfortunately, in many cases cooking is required in order to make these nutrients absorbable in the body. The Spanish research clearly shows that steaming is the optimum way of cooking vegetables. It also clearly shows that microwaving destroys pretty well all the really important nutrients in broccoli. If microwaving destroys nutrients in broccoli, is there any reason to believe that it would not also destroy vital nutrients in other foods? Considering that the microwave oven was introduced for general domestic use about 30 years ago it really is quite astounding that it is only now being realized that microwaving has a devastating effect on vital food components.

Finally, it is clear that the vital nutrient content in broccoli is dramatically reduced through transportation, storage, and cooking. The optimum way of obtaining all the benefits of broccoli is by sprouting organic broccoli seeds. Sprouted broccoli seeds have about 40 times more of cancer preventive nutrients than does cooked broccoli and animal experiments have shown that these sprouted seeds are highly protective against prostate cancer and perhaps other cancers as well.